It is frequently said that human beings are 'social' animals. Certainly, I see that this is the case: I write these very words using implements I could never have created alone and I write them in an inevitable reaction to the writing of others. It is consciousness - consciousness of our possessious, our limitations, our morality, which binds us.

And yet, consciousness leads me back into myself. Such is the act of life, the spectacle of exteriority so many others present to each other - each individual performing so many variations that it is often hard to keep up - that I sometimes feel I cannot even pretend to trust the consistency of another. I shyly spurn society precisely because I cannot act. I cannot act because I am so genuinely multiple, so antagonistic to any consistent singularity, that I am able to project nothing into the world. My breathing, panting, sighing body is the mundane flesh of what I shall never be; while others appear to have learned which act to perform and upon which stage, I am so relentlessly conscious of the emptiness of the whole thing that I simply cannot act - like a child who, having been told not to lie, runs around aimlessly telling the truth.

Consciousness is a desolate plain where, perhaps, there was once Life.